Summary:Emerging as a consequence of industrial production
organized on the largest scale, and thus in the age of effective
prohibitions, glamour appears as an offence, that is through
spending, as well as through mass consumption, which is
characteristic of industrial societies. The proportions of
production and consumption, introduced by industrial
revolution, and the consequent changes in social conditions,
turned glamour into the largest spectacle ever accessible to
human societies. That is the spectacle of the consumer culture,
the saint of the modern age. Icons of glamour represent the
gods revered by the modern man.
Glamour has quickly and easily moved from cinema
to various lines of industry of life styles, and crucial for its
mass popularization was the importance of costume designed
for the Hollywood melodramas. Costume has become one of
the basic features of both aesthetics and semantics. When we
take into consideration that the purpose of clothing is, in the
first place, the spectacularization of identities, a question
arises: what is the content which this stylistic language treats
and communicates? We discover that in the very heart of this
aesthetic concept rests Georges Bataille's notion of eroticism
as eternal longing to establish the lost totality or continuity, an
attempt to overcome the gap between the rational and the
irrational in man. This is why the fundamental signifying
focus of glamour is composed of problems of sexuality and
death. With channelling social hysteria into a stylistic excess,
glamour appears in the form of aesthetic and moral
misdemeanour. Glamour allows one to, in transposing the
forbidden contents into the visual, into the language of
clothing, step out from mediocre, moderate, appropriate or
functional, and into the unattainable, into the everlasting...
In the process of spectacularization, the biological
sexuality and mortality become entirely neutralized. Glamour
managed to overcome the eternal problems of man by
completely divorcing beauty and appeal, but also death, from
the corporeal and the social givens. One has, through
integrating oneself into the spectacle, at last realized the unity
with the world, but the price of this success is exorbitant. One
can free oneself from the loneliness and death only when
turned into an image.